BELLEVILLE JOURNAL

BELLEVILLE JOURNAL; Restoring Heritage and Raising Hopes for Future

By CHARLES STRUM

Published: March 2, 1992

BELLEVILLE, N.J.—
IN the 81 years since Andrew Carnegie's money built a library here, prosperity has come and gone in this blue-collar community of small stores, empty factories and modest houses packed closely on narrow streets.

What remained largely intact was the library, as squat and staunch as so many municipal structures of its era, a massive piece of brick and masonry that once stood out for its grandeur and now barely stands out at all, its Georgian facade obscured by a boxy brick addition.

Staring into the drabness of the main commercial boulevard, Washington Street, the library was a utilitarian set of rooms whose interior reflected the bleak business climate outside. Dingy dropped ceilings, old paint and peeling brown and tan floor tiles formed the setting for a hodgepodge of tables, chairs and bookcases washed in harsh fluorescent lighting, an effect the director, David Bryant, called the "East German look."

But the false front and indoor clutter did not obscure the ideal the original building was meant to glorify. Despite hard times, Mr. Bryant and the library board, aided by several generous bequests, combined to meet, for the second time in nine decades, the only real requirement Carnegie ever attached to his gifts. He asked that the buildings he financed "look like libraries," Mr. Bryant said.

The result is a remodeled main reading room that looks nothing like the original, which Mr. Bryant described as an austere white plaster vault with 15-foot ceilings. What it resembles now is a grand temple for books and readers, a fantasy of classical design elements that were the vision of James J. Cozzarelli Jr., an interior designer and president of the library board, who donated his time.

With a glance at the ceiling murals, Len Andrews, a cook from Nutley who browses through volumes of recipes, said, "The first time I came in I thought someone was looking over my shoulder."

And so there is. He is a muscular young man who in a series of panels across the ceiling receives knowledge and eventually the power of wisdom from an old sage who directs him in his quest. This scene, painted on canvas by Stephen Bianco Rodriguez of Piscataway, was assembled on the ceiling like pieces of a puzzle, its figures gazing down on fluted pilasters, gilded capitals and denticulated pediments in tans and reds.

Mr. Cozzarelli, who had already remodeled the children's room and other library spaces, calls it "a cathedral for knowledge to improve people, to vault them to greater thoughts." For this, he said, he joined "classical design and high-tech fusion."

A sentimental link with the library's past appears at the front of the Carnegie Room. Mr. Cozzarelli said old-timers expressed regret that the 1981 addition obscured the pediment and columns framing the entryway. So he designed interior substitutes. Though freestanding, like a sculpture, they are anchored visually by a large desk designed to resemble an altar. It is the librarian's, and her chair is a stylized throne.

The renovation, including structural repair and duct work, came to more than $300,000, with only about $40,000 from the town budget, an expenditure that provoked a manageable amount of concern from some taxpayers who feared the possibility of being bankrupted in a recession by a gang of free-spending esthetes.

The Belleville Public Library's transformation is relatively rare in the rarefied world of Carnegie-sponsored library buildings. Dr. George Bobinksi, dean of the School of Information and Library Studies at the State University at Buffalo, says 1,681 libraries were built with Carnegie money, mostly between 1898 and 1917.

In a survey, he found that at least 1,554 of the buildings still exist, with only 911 of these still in use as public libraries. At least 276 of the survivors are unchanged, while 243 have been demolished, 286 have been expanded and 175 have been remodeled. Others have been turned into condominiums, community centers or shops.

Belleville's library began as so many town libraries did, with volunteers. Here, they were from the Tuesday Afternoon Reading Club, which eventually set up a storefront library. By 1909, a site at Academy and Washington Streets had been acquired from the town, Carnegie had donated $20,000, and a local architect, Charles Granville Jones, had been hired.

At the dedication of the Carnegie Room yesterday, Mr. Bryant spoke of the library's potential to help "enchant, comfort or so liberate the mind" of a young person that he or she "will emerge from here a thinker, a caring individual, with an insightful mind, who may win a Nobel Prize."

But he was also clearly thinking of hopes for Belleville's rebirth when he praised the remodeling as an "effort to achieve civic greatness -- pulling it off on a modest budget."

Photo: The reading room of the Belleville (N.J.) Public Library, which was redesigned in accord with Andrew Carnegie's requirement. (William E. Sauro/The New York Times) Map of New Jersey showing location of Belleville.